Query Correction Feature

Coveo Cloud supports a query correction feature, also known as Did You Mean, which can suggest substitutes for, or even automatically correct misspelled keywords.

Auto corrected query example

This article explains how to enable this feature in your search interfaces, and provides a high-level overview of the way it works.

Enabling the Feature

In a JavaScript Search Framework interface, you can enable the query correction feature by initializing a DidYouMean component.

Visually, this component is intended to appear in the results column, above the result list. Most sample search interfaces include this component by default.

<div id="search" class="CoveoSearchInterface">
  <!-- ... -->
  <div class="coveo-main-section">
    <!-- ... -->
    <div class="coveo-results-column">
      <!-- ... -->
      <div class="CoveoDidYouMean"></div>
      <!-- ... -->
      <div class="CoveoResultList"></div>
      <!-- ... -->
    </div>
  </div>
  <!-- ... -->
</div>

By default, the component automatically triggers a new query when no results are returned and a query correction is available. If you want to disable this behavior, set the component’s enableAutoCorrection option to false.

<div class="CoveoDidYouMean" data-enable-auto-correction="false"></div>

Understanding the Feature

When a queried term is not (or rarely) present in indexed items, by default Coveo Cloud looks for any terms with a similar spelling and a significantly higher number of occurrences in your index. When terms that match these conditions are found, the following actions occur:

  • If the current query returns results but more frequently occurring terms with similar spelling are found in the index, a link containing the new terms is provided. Selecting this link triggers a new query using the corrected keywords.

  • If the current query returns no results, and the DidYouMean component’s enableAutoCorrection option is not explicitly set to false, the keywords are automatically replaced by the most frequently occurring terms with the closest spelling and a new query is triggered.

  • An end user is trying to find a specific movie on your theater’s search page. The end user sends a query with the keywords Ex Mcanhia, which returns no results. The DidYouMean feature automatically corrects the keywords to Ex Machina and triggers a new query using the new keywords.

  • An end user is trying to find a specific movie on your theater’s search page. The end user sends a query with the keywords Ex Machnia, which returns a few results. The DidYouMean feature suggests that the end user instead uses the keywords Ex Machina.

Limitations

  • The index must have at least 2,000 items to start providing query corrections.

    The relevance of the corrections improves with the size of the index, as more correctly-spelled terms become available for comparison.

  • The Did You Mean feature ignores query keywords that:

    • Are less than four characters long.

    • Contain more than four digits.

    • Begin with a digits.

    • Contain seven or more consecutive consonants.

    • Contain six or more consecutive vowels.

    • Contain an invalid number of consecutive vowels, considering the item language.

    • Contain wildcard expressions.

  • The Did You Mean feature also does not process queries that were:

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